In fact, The New York Times published a famous editorial in 1920 criticizing Robert Goddard for suggesting that rockets could be used in space.
“That professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
The newspaper published an apology on July 17, 1969, the day that Apollo 11 launched.